Linaro announces support for Samsung's Origen ARM Cortex A9 board

LINUX DEVELOPER Linaro has announced that it will provide development tools for Samsung's Origen dual-core Cortex A9 reference board.

Samsung's Origen reference board sports a dual-core 1GHz Samsung Exynos 4210 system-on-chip (SoC) processor based on ARM's Cortex A9 design. It delivers graphics processing via a Mali-400 core and the chip is mated to 1GB of DDR3 RAM. The board is set to retail for less than $200 (£120) and become the Samsung reference design for developers who want to get in on dual-core ARM action.

Stephen Doel, COO of Linaro told The INQUIRER that the time is right for low-cost ARM Cortex A9 reference boards to arrive and that it is still too early for boards with chips based on ARM's Cortex A15 to appear. Doel added that he expects the Samsung's Origen board "to be the default development board".

Aside from Samsung's Exynos 4210 SoC package and 1GB of DDR3, the Origen board features a WiFi and Bluetooth module, a camera interface, an MMC/SD card reader, serial and USB host connections, an HDMI output, standard 3.5mm audio jacks and an LCD interface. There is also, of course, the mandatory JTAG interface for testing and debugging.

Although Samsung's Origen board might not appear in devices itself, the combination of components that make it up is expected to tip up in smartphones, tablets and 'connected screens' - display devices that need some computing capability.

Linaro has said that it will provide development tools for Samsung's Origen board to support Linux kernel development, the Android mobile operating system and Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution from the third quarter of 2011. µ